Explaining the Spread of White Anger, by Robert Weissberg. The original sin of affirmative action:
Violating the merit principle … affirmative action guarantees disgruntled white males far in excess of its true victims. Consider hiring five firefighters strictly according to civil service exam scores. Let’s assume that a hundred men apply for the position and can be ranked by test scores. The top four are white and are hired. Now, thanks to a Department of Justice consent decree, the fire department must hire at least one African American from the list and if the highest ranking black scores at 20 in the array he will be hired despite his middling score.
How many white males have actually lost their job to a black? The correct answer is exactly one, the fifth ranking applicant. But how many whites will mistakenly believe that they lost out to an affirmative action candidate? The answer is 14 since this is the number of rejected white candidates between 6 and 19 and, to be honest, all can make a legitimate claim of being passed over to satisfy the diversity bean counters. …
In the pre-affirmative action era only a few blacks attended college, nearly all of whom got there on merit. Whites (and Asians) would likely view them as equals, no small benefit in a society obsessed with expunging “racist stereotypes” regarding black intellectual ability.
Now imagine that due to government pressure the number of blacks admitted substantially grew and, unless overall enrollment correspondingly expanded, fewer academically borderline whites would be admitted so college life became an experience where smart whites encountered lots of intellectually challenged blacks. …
The big lie:
What makes this coerced diversity so hard to swallow is that its purpose rests on a plain-to-see but impossible to express fraud — the alleged benefits of diversity. Indeed, the elite’s obsessive proclamations of this lie far more closely resemble propaganda than celebrating a cliché-like truth.
Simply put, if diversity is so wonderful, and in the self-interest of universities and businesses, why must it be imposed forcefully? Surely if it was as beneficial as advertised, there would be no need for disparate impact lawsuits, training to overcome implicit bias and similar measures that resemble mothers punishing junior for not eating his lima beans. Does government and the social justice camp followers really believe that diversity is akin to chocolate or red wine whose consumption hardly needs coercion?
Now for what really fuels the anger over coerced diversity: it is one thing to demand sacrifices for a clearly understood, noble cause — WW II rationing, for example. But it is quite another to demand sacrifices for a cause whose benefits rest on an obvious falsehood, and it is hard to imagine a bigger lie than “Diversity is Our Strength.”
Even worse, today’s PC dogma insists that those coerced into this charade dare not complain, at least in public, since such caviling will be deemed “racist” and a defense of white privilege. An unemployable white male Harvard Ph.D. in English will be told to just shut up and get an adjunct position at a community college. After all, the barely competent black who beat him out for the Yale job had enslaved ancestors.
Trump:
No wonder Trump received such enthusiastic welcomes by white males — the anger has been silently boiling for decades and this was perhaps the first instance where it could be expressed albeit indirectly.
Imagine if a speaker at a Trump a rally was more forthcoming: “We are sick and tired of being pushed aside so that some incompetent minority can take our place in the name of diversity whose only purpose is to make some airhead social justice warrior feel good about herself. How many people in this audience personally know anybody who lost their job to a less-qualified ‘diversity candidate’? Give me a show of hands.”
One can only imagine the panic of every corporate CEO, college president and other Thinkgood Americans upon hearing this speech. They would demand that Trump immediately repudiate it.
